Microsoft says it is in such a rush to build these buildings (for what? We don’t know) that it simply can’t wait for the normal city reviews. It will get approvals through a self-certification process and has agreed to foot all the costs for required water and wastewater infrastructure, even though a study to determine exactly what that entails hasn’t been completed yet.

But it hasn’t offered many other details – except one that deserves way more debate: That each of those five buildings would use no more than a million gallons of water a day at build-out.

That's not a trivial amount of water

Record screech. Yeah, hold up.

Presuming this technology center builds out as expected, Microsoft is planning to eventually use a maximum of five million gallons of water. A day.

To do the math, that’s about 15.3 acre-feet a day, or about 5,600 acre-feet a year.

Now wait. Before we get all “we can’t afford another one of those in the desert,” consider that Intel recycles the majority of the water it uses. And not only that, but much of the water it uses is treated effluent from the city of Chandler.